Idea guy: Steve Rosencranz, president and founder of The Woods Project.

Pre-woods: As a student at Lamar High School, Rosencranz's shyness was disabling: He never collaborated with others and ended up doing everything himself.

Woods: But then he became a counselor at an outdoor camp in Maine. Surrounded by beautiful scenery, he was able to reach out to others and put together his first team. That success gave him confidence to take on other challenges in his life.

The idea: Once you have internalized a model for success, even if it's simply climbing a mountain or lighting a campfire, you can apply the confidence and fresh sense of yourself to other challenges.

How it grew: In the '80s, Rosencranz told a boss that he was an idiot and that one of them needed to leave. Out of a job, Rosencranz decided to start a business. "I didn't know anything about raising money or starting a business."

But he did it -- twice -- starting and selling first Creekwood Capital, then Briar Capital.

In 2006, after the sale of his second business, he approached Mike Feinberg, one of the founders of the KIPP charter school system. Rosencranz asked Feinberg to help him find teachers and kids who wanted to go to the woods and volunteers to make it happen.

Rosencranz and his team then took eleven KIPP kids to Yosemite for ten days. "The kids blossomed," he says. "It was amazing to watch these kids come out of their shells and develop a whole new vision of who they were and how they could function in the world." The next year, he took 36 high school kids and 10 volunteers to Glacier National Park. Every summer the number of kids and volunteers continued to grow.

About six years ago he decided that he had a model that worked. To support that model, he founded a nonprofit, The Woods Project. It now works with students from 19 schools in the Houston area; kids ages 14 to 18 can apply.

Why inner city kids? While working with a buddy to start a program of micro-lending, Rosencranz learned about deep poverty. People who are poor, whose parents and grandparents were poor, often haven't internalized any model of success, he says. It's as if they are trapped in a deep well without a ladder.

To break the cycle of poverty, he thought, students needed to experience success. "As to my motivation: It was combining what I loved with a problem that needed solving—giving low income kids the tools they needed to build a future for themselves and their families."

Why the woods? Rosencranz thinks the woods are "a spiritual place." But his program could be set "80 feet under the sea in the Caribbean," he says -- anyplace where kids can disconnect from the distractions in their lives, and where challenges force them to stand on their own two feet. "That's when kids learn how to think."

Idea in action: This summer, Rosencranz says, a kid named Brenly went into the woods. "When the rest of the kids in his group told Brenly that he was a leader and worthy of being followed , he said something to the effect of, 'I've always been a nobody. No one has ever noticed me before, and you guys have noticed me.' Brenly was floored that people thought he had leadership skills. Brenly had no confidence—had spent most of junior high drinking wine in the school bathroom—and considered himself a zero. He came away realizing he had a role to play." (Brenly himself describes the experience in the video below.)

Even a taste of travel from home increases kids' odds of making it in college, Rosencranz says. But the enhanced confidence is the game changer. Low-income students tend to be easily discouraged by obstacles. By the time their trip to the woods ends, Rosencranz says, the teens have begun discovering other powers they never knew they had, such as tenacity and cooperation.

Next big step: Rosencranz is now working to transform the Woods Project from a start-up into a mature organization that moves beyond its founder, "changing it from something built around me into something where I'm not material to the success."

"I'm a starter—not an operator," he says. "I have a number of ideas in mind of next nonprofit ventures." But he plans to be around the Woods Project for a long while.

Favorite campfire song: Rosencranz resists the question. He says he doesn't sing: "It embarrasses both me and the listener."

But, he says, "Jimi Hendrix is one of the cool people in my life (OK, on vinyl, but in my life)."

And Hendrix's "Voodoo Song" resonates with Rosencranz's ideas about the wilderness:

If you can just get your mind togetherThen come on across to meWe'll hold hands and then we'll watch the sunriseFrom the bottom of the sea.But first, are you experienced?Have you ever been experienced?Well, I have.I know, I know you probably scream and cryThat your little world won't let you go,But who in your measly little worldAre you trying to prove thatYou're made out of gold and, eh, can't be sold?

The bottom line: "Once you find the peace and joy of the woods, you keep going back," Rosencranz says.